Explorations of the Human Form

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Rendering the human form has always been an essential part of artmaking. The artists of the modern period found myriad ways of continuing the pursuit from the lens of a fast-developing world that had suddenly changed around them. Artists like Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso continuously found new expression through the human form, as evidenced by works from Standards of Excellence: The Blema and H. Arnold Steinberg Collection.

Explorations of the Human Form

Henri Matisse, Les Deux odalisques, 1927. Estimate $120,000–180,000.

Les Deux odalisques was executed in preparation for a series of large, daringly colored canvases of one or more languorously reclining or seated women in various states of undress. This drawing bears the closest resemblance to a 1928 painting of two odalisques in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

In the spring of 1914, Popova returned to Moscow from Paris where she had been studying Cubism at Académie La Palette under the instruction of Henri Le Fauconnier and Jean Metzinger. The present work captures the zeitgeist of 1914 with its powerful maturity, finished sculptural quality and superb use of shading.

Léger had spent time in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, including visits to New York City, but it was seeing men swaying on steel girders high above him on a French construction site that famously inspired this series. "I saw man like a flea; he seemed still lost in his inventions with the sky above him. I wanted to render that; the contrast between man and his inventions, between the worker and all that metal architecture, that hardness, that ironwork, those bolts and rivets.”

Throughout his career, Henry Moore explored variations of the human form in his sculpture, particularly in his various examples of female reclining figures and mothers with children. The fallen warrior is one of the few male figures that Moore created outside of family groups. Moore looked to ancient Greek sculpture for inspiration, and the vulnerability with which the male figure is presented is likely an allusion to the suffering and trauma of the post-war era.

The theme of the nude fascinated Matisse throughout his life. From even before his Fauve period, Matisse presented the female form in an idiom all his own. However, it was the 1920s and the introduction of exotic Odalisques that saw Matisse revolutionize this iconic mode, forevermore seducing his viewers with lush visions of idealized beauty.

Buste de femme nue is one of a series of drawings, many now in museum collections, which inform a large-scale oil he was to complete in Paris in the fall of 1906. Of this painting, Margaret Werth writes “While Two Nudes constitutes a high point in Picasso’s strictly pictorial investigation of the possibilities and limits of figuration in 1906, it is certainly more than a formal exercise… The painting is also liminal in that it situates itself between formal investigation and allegorical or narrative subject; between the classical and the archaic or primitive; between materialization and dematerialization of the body; between figuration and disfiguration; and between masculine and feminine” (Picasso, The Early Years 1892-1906 (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. & Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1997-98, p. 277).

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